Mission of Burma: Still Reigning Champs

Last Friday, Boston postpunk band Mission of Burma closed out a two-night engagement at the Paradise Rock Club by playing its 1981 album Vs. in its entirety. It was a potentially risky move for a band that has released new material as recently as 2006. Mission of Burma could have come across as antiquarian, its members curators of themselves.

Instead, they tore the roof off the Paradise.

Vs., the only full-length studio album the band has ever released (other efforts have been EPs or live albums), is headphone music: a record to listen to while scratching your chin, not rocking a party. Unlike its predecessor Signals, Calls, and Marches, it doesn't offer many opportunities to pump your fist.

Translated live, however, the record sounds like a tempest. Mission of Burma plays loud, and, on Friday, the volume allowed for a cascade of nonharmonic overtones to drench the venue in a sound that felt like a gauzy sonic drape. The show was more like a time travel device, opening a portal to 1981, than a mannered exhibit or an evening of standards. Within the fistfuls of chords, you could hear the birth and death of punk rock and pinpoint the moment when something more thoughtful, expressive, personal--yet utterly annihilating--took its place.

Mission of Burma incorporated elements from avant-garde music and art into its punk rock. (The band even recorded a song called "Max Ernst," which ends with the refrain "Dada dada dada.") Nonetheless, unlike its contemporaries in New York's avant-garde No Wave scene, Mission of Burma's music stayed catchy and, if the couple in the foreground is any indication, sexy. (Courtney Lockemer)